With the literary work—if we may call it such—of the monastic period, and with the religious poems of the learned German monks, we have nothing to do. German literature at all worthy of the name begins with the various _Lieder_, or romantic lays and lyrics of the twelfth century. The impulse to the Romances of Alexander and of the Table Round came from the trouvères of Northern France; the impulse to the lyrics of chivalrous minstrelsy came from the troubadours of Languedoc. During the Crusades the German barons were prominent, and that great motley pilgrimage of Frenchmen, Germans, Provençals, and Italians to the Holy Land was the means of spreading the legends and literary manners of the one to the knowledge and imitation of the rest. It was probably in this way, it was certainly at this time, that arose the Minne-Gesang and the army of Minnesänger, who were its poets. Minne means “love,” and love is the special theme of those who copied the troubadours. The lyrics of the Minnesänger are primarily love-ditties of the kind which have been already described as current in Provence. Not that all their _Lieder_ were lyric songs. There were also legends and romances, satires and fables. Most famous among all the creations of mediaeval Germany stands forth the _Nibelungen Lied_, the “Lay of the Nibelungen.” Properly speaking the title is _The Calamity of the Nibelungen_—_Der Nibelungen Noth_. The work is an epic, the one epic of Germany. It records how Siegfried, a hero of the fifth century, was done to treacherous death through the jealousy of the Amazon Queen Brünhild, and how his murder was ruthlessly avenged by his wife Kriemhild. The Nibelungen are properly fabulous giants of the Land of Fog, but when a vast treasure, which Siegfried has taken from them, comes into the hands of the Burgundians at Worms, these Burgundians become in turn the Nibelungen. And since it is upon the lords of these hapless Burgundian Nibelungen that Kriemhild’s vengeance falls, the poem is rightly styled _Der Nibelungen Noth_. Such is the plot of this “Iliad of Germany,” of which the collecting or formulation dates from about the year 1200, and which is full of great exploits and great passions, of witchcraft and murder and grimness. From a literary point of view the composition is one of great vigour but of no less great uncouthness. One other product of the time deserves some mention. It is the beast story, or satirical fable, of _Reineke Fuchs_—“Reynard the Fox”—wherein the cunning of the fox is contrasted with the qualities of the other animals, who each bear a special sobriquet, and wherein human practices are all the time playfully satirized. That the French borrowed this beast-epic in their _Roman de Renart_ from the Germans, and not the Germans from the French, is clear from the names borne by the various animals, such as the French _renard_, the fox, and _baudet_, the donkey, which are but the old German nicknames, Reynhart and Baldwin, in slight disguise.